In an academic community where a significant proportion of its members have insufficient understanding of a theory, and the reasoning that underlies it, such that they are obliged to take it on trust, like a religious faith, the potential arises for the community of faith to be split into factions, based on differences of belief.
In the SFL community, the two significant religious factions are those that take the theorising of Fawcett and Martin as their doctrinal source of belief, and members of each faction are, accordingly, faithful to the individual theorist in each case.
The reason why the doctrines of Fawcett and Martin can only be taken on trust is that neither is logically self-consistent, let alone consistent with SFL Theory, as demonstrated here for Fawcett's theory, the Cardiff Grammar, and here, here and here for Martin's theories of discourse semantics and context.
As these reviews demonstrate, neither Fawcett nor Martin understand SFL Theory sufficiently well to be able to develop the theory without compromising its scientific rigour.
Fawcett's model (2010: 36), inter alia, confuses meaning with form, and axis with instantiation. And Martin's model (1992: 495-6), inter alia, relabels lexicogrammar (cohesion) as discourse semantics and misconstrues varieties of language, register and genre (text type) as context instead of language. For each doctrine, the internal contradictions invalidate the architecture of the model.
But such shortcomings are inaccessible to community members who themselves do not sufficiently understand SFL theory, nor recognise that the theory is scientifically rigorous, and so these doctrines continue to be supported as an act of faith.
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